Tag: fundraising

If you’re tired of fundraisers, join the club. Whether you’re the one peddling overpriced goods for your kids or the one being hit up to buy them, it’s never fun. There is always some guilt when you ask someone to buy something you know is a horrible deal because it will “help the kids”. Take the guilt out of raising money with Great Lakes Scrip.

The Scrip program works like this. You buy gift cards for the things that you buy everyday. A portion of the gift card purchase is then routed to the school or organization of choice. There are different percentages for different cards and they run promotions from time to time where cards have higher percentages than usual. There is no markup or special cost to you or anyone who buys the cards, including the organization. Pretty simple right?

You’re probably wondering what the catch is. How are they able to give your organization a portion of the gift card purchase without charging anything extra? The way I understand it is that Great Lakes Scrip purchases the cards from companies at a discount and then turns around and sells them to you at full price. The difference between what you pay and they pay is what goes to the organization on your behalf.

Our daughters go to a private school and we’ve used this program for the past couple of years to help pay for their tuition. Our school has it set up so that the money earned can go to the school’s general fund or go towards our tuition. We chose the tuition option of course. Whenever we need to get a gift card, we go out to shopwithscrip.com, find the cards we need and process the order. We can pay for them electronically from our checking account at a minimal fee of $0.15 per order, or take a check to the school. The physical cards are delivered to the school within a week of when the school processes the order.

For those moments when you need something a little more quickly, you can look for the ScripNow option. Once you process your payment, an email arrives in your inbox with a link to the electronic gift card that you can print out. This is great for those last-minute purchases to Amazon.com or when you’re in a store and want to get one to cover your purchase. We did this to buy carpet from Lowe’s. Our total was around $1500 and we got about $60 put towards tuition. It may not sound like much, but it only cost us $0.15 to process the order electronically and we got $60 in return.

Finally, some of the cards have a ReloadNow option which allows you to add additional dollars to a card you already have. They don’t process as quickly as ScripNow, but within one business day, the card is usually reloaded. This is great for gas cards or other cards that you would use regularly. We use it for Speedway cards. At a 4% rebate and $3 a gallon in gas, it’s like saving 12 cents a gallon. At $4 a gallon, it goes up to 16 cents a gallon.

If you or your family are in any way involved with a nonprofit organization and are looking for a creative way to raise funds all year-long, I would encourage you to check out the Scrip program. You can start by checking out the How Scrip Works page. If you’re interested in learning more or starting a program for your organization, club, school, or other nonprofit, you can request more information here.